Media Mentions

Annette Gordon-Reed, interviewed by Nawal Arjini: “Writing, teaching, activism, organizing—he did everything. And I feel a responsibility, or desire, to reach as many people as I can with my writing that grows out of my interest in the Black struggle.”

For years, we’ve been told that electric autonomous taxis can help fight climate change by reducing air pollution. But new research from Harvard Law School suggests these supposedly “zero emissions” vehicles could actually exacerbate many of the problems we are facing today. A new study led by Ashley Nunes, a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, concluded that fleets of electric autonomous taxis could “dramatically increase energy consumption and emissions that contribute to climate change — not reduce them.” “While electric vehicles themselves have lower emissions than traditional gasoline-powered ones, our work shows that deploying electric robocabs en masse on America’s streets could actually increase the number of trips, miles driven, and overall emissions,” Nunes said in a release.

During the first few months of 2021, President Biden seemed overly reluctant to go after GOP governors over their approach to the spread of covid-19 in their states. The thinking appeared in part to be that this would polarize masks and vaccines, making GOP voters more reluctant to utilize both, setting us back further. ... Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, who had previously advocated for moves like this, notes that what’s at issue is “the rights of America’s children to a safe classroom environment.” “That legal strategy holds great promise of circumventing gubernatorial obstruction of vital local initiatives,” Tribe told us. Tribe added that this is “essential in states whose governors are evidently more concerned with towing the ideological Trump line on vaccines and masks than they are with the health and survival of our kids.”

If American democracy were a hospital patient, the diagnosis would be "critical".  ... In response to the dagger being pointed at the heart of American democracy by Donald Trump, his followers and the Jim Crow Republican Party, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are not acting with the necessary urgency. In a new op-ed for the Boston Globe, Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at Harvard, offers this warning:  "We need to begin with the fundamental precept that not all crimes are created equal. Those crimes — regardless of who allegedly commits them — whose very aim is to overturn a fair election whereby our tradition of peaceful, lawful succession from one administration to the next takes place — a tradition begun by George Washington, continued by John Adams, and preserved by every president since except Donald Trump — are impossible to tolerate if we are to survive as a constitutional republic."

When 181 CEOs pledged to run their companies to benefit customers, workers and communities as well as shareholders, it was hailed as a breakthrough moment for capitalism. Two years later, two Harvard Law School researchers find that the companies have done little to act on the pledge. Most of their key documents, such as bylaws and corporate governance guidelines, still emphasize running the company for the benefit of shareholders.... The two Harvard Law professors, Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita, found only two companies that place other stakeholders on a par with shareholders. Both firms, Cummins and International Paper, had their guidelines in place before the Business Roundtable statement was written.

Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita’s op-ed “‘Stakeholder’ Talk Proves Empty Again” (Aug. 19) is probably correct, as far as it goes. On its face, the Business Roundtable’s statement is far from having been meaningfully implemented. Market pressures from investors to sustain profits are substantial. On the other hand, progress, while glacial, is occurring and the Business Roundtable’s statement may have been a pull. Institutional investors are now rattling the cage in favor of recognizing stakeholder values such as wages, working conditions and environment. Major investors are now with policy positions of their own, making it clear that they will, in the future, take account of what companies may or may not be doing regarding stakeholders. Public pressure from consumers to rectify some of the problems and inequalities of the past is also mounting.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Afghanistan wasn’t the only majority Muslim country that the Joe Biden administration lost in the last week. Establishing a functioning democracy in Afghanistan was hard — so hard it turned out to be impossible. Tunisia, which on Monday passed from the status of functioning democracy to effective autocracy, would have been an easy win for Biden’s nominal commitment to sustain democracy around the world — if the administration had bothered to pay meaningful attention to it. Instead, the administration stood by and did nothing while the elected president of the Arab world’s only democracy suspended parliament in violation of the Tunisian constitution and announced that the members of the parliament would henceforth be subject to arrest.

... Gersh’s experience is emblematic of a type of harassment called doxing. Slang for doc-dropping, doxing is the process of making someone’s address, contact information, identity, or other information public, usually in order to intimidate, harass, or incite public outrage. ... This approach comes with some advantages, says Kendra Albert, a clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. You don’t need law enforcement or a prosecutor to buy into the fact you’ve been doxed, and the burden of proving you’ve been doxed is lighter than it would be in criminal court. However, when you’re being doxed by hundreds of people (some of whom may use anonymous accounts), it can be hard to identify just one person to sue. “These laws are based primarily on the idea that you’re suing one individual, which may not be very helpful if what’s happening is a huge mob of people or multiple people are sharing the information,” Albert said.

The Biden administration has nearly completed a policy to govern counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional war zones, but the abrupt collapse of the Afghan government and a recent flurry of strikes in Somalia have raised new problems, according to current and former officials. ... But creating any bureaucratic system and planning for drone strikes cut against Mr. Biden’s repeated statements that he wants to end the forever war, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who frequently writes about national security legal policy. “I don’t blame them because I think real threats persist,” he added. “It’s better to have a system for dealing with them than just letting the Pentagon do whatever it wants. But creating a system for drone strikes doesn’t sound like the path to winding down the forever war.”

We did not get a full accounting of the violent insurrection of Jan. 6 during the second impeachment of the president who instigated it. We did not get a bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot, because Republicans blocked it. We do not yet see signs of an exhaustive Justice Department criminal inquiry into the effort to deny the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. But now, we just might get the investigation we need by way of the House. ... “The sweeping demand for executive branch records is good news with respect to the scope of the hearing and the ambition of the select committee in getting to the bottom of who did or knew what — and when they did or knew it and with whom — in the long lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection and in the surrounding events,” constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. “My hope is that the Justice Department will take a cue from the breadth of what the select committee is doing.”

Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder and former CEO of Theranos, is set to go to trial this week, more than three years after being indicted on multiple federal fraud and conspiracy charges over allegations she knowingly misrepresented the capabilities of her company's proprietary blood testing technology. ... Legal experts say central to the trial will be questions about what Holmes knew, when she knew it, and whether she intended to deceive. "Either she had a device that could never work, or that couldn't work yet. The latter is a more murky situation," said Nancy Gertner, a former US federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School.

Mark Roe, corporate law professor at Harvard University, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the Liberal party’s plans to hike corporate taxes for banks and insurers. He notes the move might result in less equity for the Banks should a downturn arise, but notes it’s likely not enough a tax increase for institutions to move money into other parts of the business.

Full overview of the new HLS shield.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos was a second-year law student when the Supreme Court ruled — unsatisfactorily, he believed — on the Pennsylvania gerrymandering case Vieth v. Jubelirer. For Stephanopoulos, it was a game-changer: election law, democratic theory, and the American electoral system have since come to dominate his career.

Emily M. Broad Leib ’08, faculty director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic, examines legal and other hurdles to reducing waste.

In a new book, “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech,” Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University, looks at ways government can combat disinformation.

An op-ed by Jonathan S. Gould and Nicholas Stephanopoulos: Democracy in America is under attack. Red states are churning out laws that make it harder to vote and easier for partisans to subvert elections. A round of ruthless gerrymandering is set to begin later this year. The influence of money in politics is greater than ever. A pair of congressional bills—the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—would tackle these challenges head-on, but they are stuck as long as the filibuster remains in place. And the filibuster doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

An op-ed by I. Glenn Cohen: The COVID-19 pandemic not over for the U.S., but the Delta variant means the “war has changed,” as leaked CDC slides made clear. The development and production of COVID-19 vaccines are an achievement on the scale of the Manhattan Project, but unless and until more of the U.S. public is vaccinated infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are likely to increase in scale across much of the country. After an impressive roll out, our vaccination rates have stalled. Canada, which faced challenges early on getting enough doses and thus started later than the U.S., by mid-July had surpassed the U.S. both in first-dose and full vaccinated and enters August much better poised to confront Delta.

Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) is launching an ambitious three-year “pop-up” research initiative, the Institute for Rebooting Social Media.

An op-ed by Jennifer Mnookin and Robert Mnookin: Last week, Pfizer announced that it plans to request an emergency use authorization for a booster vaccine shot for COVID-19. Within hours, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement asserting, “Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time.” The Department of Health and Human Services reiterated this after it and senior U.S. scientists met with top Pfizer representatives this week. Immunologists, health policy experts, the director of the World Health Organization and pundits have criticized Pfizer for planning to request this approval. Some suggest that it’s a cash grab for the vaccine maker and others assert simply that more data are needed. What these responses ignore is growing evidence that a third shot may provide lifesaving protection to immunocompromised people (including organ transplant patients), who represent approximately 3% to 4% of our adult population.

Launched by former U.S. attorney Harry Litman in the spring of 2019, "Talking Feds" welcomes a rotating cast of expert guests such as Juliette Kayyem ’95 and Laurence Tribe ’66 to a lively roundtable, where they discuss legal-political issues in depth.